"2018.06.24 duet with William Davison — Toronto, Canada — via Skype": Starting on January 1st, 2018, I began making a movie every day of me playing (M)Usic.  The plan was to shoot one every day of 2018 & to string together excerpts from each of them in chronological order to make a feature-length movie to be called "365".  Along the way I decided to compile monthly reports named by month & year, e.g.: "January, 2018", & to release these online a month after they were done.  Hence, "January, 2018" was uploaded on March 1, 2018.  I started thinking about each month more & more thematically.  "May, 2018" became my piano month.  "June, 2018" is my duets month.  It was difficult to find 30 local people willing to play a duet with me to meet my goal of a different duet for every day in June so I contacted people in my international contacts to somehow make a duet together — using Skype or some other means.  We've been playing the duets for as long as they take, spontaneously deciding when they were over, & then I've been excerpting roughly :20 to a minute to use in "June, 2018" & "365".  At 1st, each movie that I made documenting each duet was thought of as little more than raw footage but, gradually, they started seeming like significant works in & of themselves.  SO, after I'd edited the footage I shot with Michael Pestal via FaceTime, I decided to declare each movie to stand on its own & to break my pattern of waiting a month to post the monthly footage to post one of these daily duets every other day starting on June 16th, until mid-August when all of them would be uploaded.  This 24th one features William Davison.  I met William through the Neoist Network.  The 1st time I remember meeting him was at the Zerowork Jubilee in Toronto in August, 1992.  We may've met before then.  He was Bill Satan in that incarnation.  At the time, if I recall correctly, I unintentionally hogged so much of the 8mm program that there was no time for his work — something I remember him being extraordinarily polite & tolerant about.  Sorry about that Bill.  Since then, we've crossed paths at the Music Gallery in Toronto in 1995, at the Po-Po into the Wasteland festival in 1998 where we literally crossed paths in performance, & at another screening of my work in 2005.  William was generous enough to welcome me to his home in 2010 when I visited Toronto to attend an exhibit/performance by our mutual friend Monty Cantsin Amen.  We've also had work on the same CD compilations organized & published by {AN} EeL.  It wasn't until this duet, however, that we finally got to do something together.  Hallelujah!  Our friendship had already been celebrated by a Facebook movie that we both found very entertaining — partially because its original musical background was so hilariously different from the sounds that we each produce.  I'd been wanting to take that movie & add a more appropriate soundtrack to it so I've interspersed it in this movie to spice up the visual variety.  Because I'd been having distortion problems with the sound in most of the other online duets I asked William to record his sounds at his end & send me the file.  Alas, when I made the edit, I made William's sound out-of-sync.  I still like the result as is anyway & I hope William does too.  He played various small electro-acoustic sources such as amplified spring & I played a set of samples of mine that I call "Set of 5 #1" because it culls from 5 different sampling projects.  I also use prefabricated sampler sounds & pre-fab DX27S sounds + sounds of my own programming (& a sampler mixer for looping).  I had an excellent time with this session & hope that it gets released as an audio recording some day.  On a different note, I often explain to people that I'm not a musician, that I'm a Usician, a Low Classicist, a booed usician, a Sound Thinker, etc.  People often seem to agree that I'm not a musician because they hate the way I play so much & hate the way I break all sorts of unwritten laws about what makes 'good music'.  In other words, they don't understand that I'm trying to make a point that I'm thinking about context & creatively exploring it.  - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE note written on July 30, 2018E.V.  

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews